Amid the hysteria over this prudent pause in refugee admissions from seven countries whose principal export is dynamite vests, it has been indignantly claimed that it's illegal for our immigration policies to discriminate on the basis of religion.

This is often said by journalists who are only in America because of immigration policies that discriminated on the basis of religion.

For much of the last half-century, Soviet Jews were given nearly automatic entry to the U.S. as "refugees."

Entering as a refugee confers all sorts of benefits unavailable to other immigrants, including loads of welfare programs, health insurance, job placement services, English language classes, and the opportunity to apply for U.S. citizenship after only five years.

Most important, though, Soviet Jews were not required to satisfy the United Nations definition of a "refugee," to wit: someone fleeing persecution based on race, religion or national origin. They just had to prove they were Jewish.

This may have been good policy, but let's not pretend the Jewish exception was not based on religion.

If a temporary pause on refugee admissions from seven majority-Muslim countries constitutes "targeting" Muslims, then our immigration policy "targeted" Christians for discrimination for about 30 years.
Never heard a peep from the ACLU about religious discrimination back then!

11
comments:

In the 70s Solzhenitsyn the famous without established a fund to help dissidents in the USSR to find exile in the West. He wryly remarked that the Americans seemed interested only in Jewish dissidents. Nathan Sharansky the funny guy who t Bush that Arabs had to pushed to democracy since "democracies do not go to war was one of them. At that time he sported a Jesus beard. Henry 'Scoop' Jackson the Senator was a leading light in the programme

Kevin MacDonald provides some historical background on 20th century Jewish migration to the US in The Culture of Critique (PDF, 261-2):

Writing in 1914, the sociologist Edward A Ross believed that liberal immigration policy was exclusively a Jewish issue. Ross quotes the prominent author and Zionist pioneer Israel Zangwill who articulated the idea that the United States is an ideal place to achieve Jewish interests.

America has ample room for all the six millions of the Pale; any one of her fifty states could absorb them. And next to being in a country of their own, there could be no better fate for them than to be together in a land of civil and religious liberty, of whose Constitution Christianity forms no part and where their collective votes would practically guarantee them against future persecution.

Jews therefore have a powerful interest in immigration policy:

Hence the endeavor of the Jews to control the immigration policy of the United States. Although theirs is but a seventh of our net immigration, they led the fight on the Immigration Commission’s bill. The power of the million Jews in the Metropolis lined up the Congressional delegation from New York in solid opposition to the literacy test. The systematic campaign in newspapers and magazines to break down all arguments for restriction and to calm nativist fears is waged by and for one race. Hebrew money is behind the National Liberal Immigration League and its numerous publications…the literature that proves the blessings of immigration to all classes in America emanates from subtle Hebrew brains.

Hence also the necessity to make the lot of Jews under the Czars worse than it already was The exaggerations about pogroms and Cossacks all served to open up the Western hearts while simultaneously maligning everything about the Russians. Nothing the Russians did was ever good enough for the majority of Jews.

Yes I have read those. The Czars in addition to Jews ruled over twenty million Muslims, whose lot could not have been much different given that all three of the Abrahamic faiths are rivals. Yet we don't see this level of contempt and manipulation from the Czarist Muslims.

It's also worth noting that the infamous 'six million Jews' actually appears in Western print media as the supposed population of Jews in the Pale of Settlement in Russian lands (the Pale being quite a large expanse of land which was home to many ethnicities). When the Jewish-owned New York Times first began supposedly collecting monies for all these 6 millions, the paper specifically mentioned the number as pertaining to Jews in Russia. BTW, JR, did you happen to notice Janet Daley of the Daily Telegraph outing herself (no surprise, given what she writes about the US and immigration, or Islam): her grandparents, we are told, emigrated to America in the 19th century to escape those 'pogroms' and she is proud to revert to the 'lefty' bent of her youth, although one would be hard pressed to see how she has ever deviated from it.

I was aware Daley was Jewish but I didn’t know her ancestry so thanks for that. In this article from January 2014 she writes: ‘At the turn of the last century my grandparents arrived at Ellis Island among the great wave of Jews fleeing to America from the Russian pogroms.’

I see that Daley is now mercifully hidden away behind the Telegraph’s new paywall. I doubt I’ll be subscribing…